To all new founders and marketers with low budget, here’s how 17 different startups hustled for their first clients. If you’re feeling disheartened, I hope their narratives will inspire you to keep on going!

In this post, I feature some of their narratives. You’ll find in them a generous mixture of grunt work, intestines, and genius.

1& 2: Tinder and Alibaba- physically traveled to their first users

Tinder went from 5,000 to 15,000 users by getting sorority daughters to signup on the spot

Crucial to Tinder’s success was then-CMO Whitney Wolfe’s ideas for constructing an early user-base. She schemed a tour that would take her to prominent college campuses around the country.

She would go to chapters of her sorority, do her presentation, and have all the girls at the meetings install the app. Then she’d go to the corresponding brother fraternity–they’d open the app and watch all these cute girls they knew. Tinder had fewer than 5,000 users before Wolfe constructed her trip-up. When she returned, there were some 15,000.”